Event: Saku 2013 in Vantaa (Finland)
Saku 2013 will take place on September 21 at the Finnish Science Center Heureka in Vantaa near Helsinki, Finland. According to the event poster it is planned to become the country's biggest Amiga event in over ten years. (snx)

AmigaOS 4: Graphic program SketchBlock 2.2
The latest version of Andy Broad's graphic program SketchBlock now can use selected areas as mask for a graphic operation. You can mark rectangles, ellipses and areas with identical colour. "It's also possible to create a selection mask from the alpha channel of a layer". Other changes:

There now a thumbnail in the layers list

Pixel transforms are now true plugins. Also added SaturationAdjust and GradientFill, RadialFill, and Ripples filters.

Martin "Mason" Mertz has contributed some great new toolbar images and a splash logo. Thanks Mason!

All (well nearly all) actions can be recorded into a macro, which can then be run or edited as needed

AmigaOS 4: AmiSystemRestore release 1 beta version 7
Chris Handley's AmiSystemRestore "aims to give AmigaOS4 a similar ability to Window's very useful system restore" by saving the systems files (SYS:) if new programms are installed. In beta 7 a bug was fixed which could can result in loss of data if softlinks were used.
(cg) (Translation: dr)

A600-accelerator board Fúria EC020 finished, production started
As Boris 'Boboo' Krizma reported, the development of his accelerator board "Fúria EC020" has finished and the production was started. First boards will be delivered to users who supported the development financially.

Likely the delivery will start at the end of September. One board costs 90 Euro. The number of the boards is limited by the number of available CPUs. A MC68EC020FG25 processor is used as well as FPU MC68882FN40. The processor has 28Mhz but can be overclocked by the user up to 37,8 Mhz.

With the help of included tools "Furiatune" provided by Martin Kuchinka you can configure some of the features of the Fúria:

Set FPU and CPU-caches on/off

(De)activate IDE-Speedup

ShadowROM (copy Kickstart ROM to RAM)

MapROM (load and use ROM-images from harddrive with up to 1 MB)

integration of additional 1,5 MB of virtual memory [probably at the expense of ShadowROM-/MapROM-functions, editor's note]

Rebbot of the computer

Display or reset of all Fúria-paramters

If you are interested in this board then please contact Boris Krizma via email.
(cg) (Translation: dr)

Vasm is a portable assembler which supports several CPU-families, vlink is a portable linker which can handle a lot of binary formats. Both are part of the compiler package vbcc.
(snx) (Translation: dr)